Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality - Chapter 05 - Humanitarianism, development and peace: a southern perspective

Every two weeks I am going to feature one of the chapters of our Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality which was published in spring 2024. 

This week we are taking a closer look at Chapter 05 - Humanitarianism, development and peace: a southern perspective - contributed by Priya Singh and Paula Banerjee.

From the introduction
There has been a significant increase in emergencies caused by conflicts and deeply entrenched development issues over the last decade in many parts of the world, especially in the Global South. New conflicts, probability of renewed conflicts, failures of peace agreements, an alarming increase in global forced displacement with most refugees finding shelter in low-and middle-income states with shared borders, are added onto earlier rounds of humanitarian crises such as partitions of countries by colonial powers (e.g. Murshid, 2014) and multi-country wars. Added to these are crises related to climate change (Jolly and Ahmad, 2019) and other ‘natural’ disasters as well as pandemics (Cook and Chen, 2022). While crises are recognised, the funding of humanitarian crisis intervention and development assistance has declined over the last few decades (UNHCR, 2020). The history of shifts, from the development-humanitarianism nexus to the humanitarianism-development-peace nexus arise from these circumstances of crises and the complexities of ushering in peace as an intrinsic part of promoting development and humanitarian assistance (Caparini and Reagan, 2019).
The chapter is written from the perspective of two scholars from the Global South. Priya Singh is a political scientist situated in a post-colonial society, who is engaged in studying issues pertaining to identity, gender, marginalisation, and development from a southern perspective. Paula Banerjee is an internationally engaged academic, located in the South, a long-time member of the Calcutta Research Group, with a long history of writing from a decolonial perspective, focusing particularly on gendered aspects of forced migration and peace. This chapter is influenced by our perspective on notions of domination, exploitation based on colonialism, and the clash between notions of Western inspired modernisation and the claims for decolonisation.

Note on contributors
Paula Banerjee specialises in issues of border and borderlands in South Asia.
She has published extensively on issues of gender, forced migration, and peace politics. She was the Vice Chancellor of Sanskrit University, Kolkata. She is a former President of the International Association for Studies of Forced Migration. She has been recently appointed as Director of the Asian Institute of Technology Centre on Gender and Forced Displacement.

Priya Singh is Associate Director at Asia in Global Affairs (AGA).
Priya is a political scientist with a linguistic understanding of some of the regions she covers. Her research focuses on themes such as identity, state formation, ethnicity, gender, migration, and marginalisation in the Global South as well as on indigenous and minority communities in West and South Asia in particular.

Overviews are already available for the following chapters:
Introduction: humanitarianism and inequality – a re-orientation

Humanitarianism and colonialism

Humanitarianism and the global Cold War, 1945–1991

Humanitarianism and the new wars: humanitarianism, security, and securitisation  

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